The University of Illinois has named Marianne Winslett as Director of the Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) in Singapore. ADSC, operated by the University of Illinois and funded by the Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR), is focused on breakthrough innovations that will make human-machine interactions as seamless and trustworthy as our interactions with each other.

Winslett, a professor of computer science and a member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory and Information Trust Institute at Illinois, assumed the title of Director on Oct. 1, 2009. She has been transitioning responsibilities with outgoing Director Benjamin Wah, an Illinois professor of electrical and computer engineering, who has accepted the position of Provost at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Winslett assumed full operational responsibilities on Nov. 1, 2009.

"I am happy to welcome Marianne into the research community at Fusionopolis in her new role as Director of ADSC," said Prof Chong Tow Chong, Executive Director of the Science and Engineering Research Council of A*STAR. "I believe that Marianne, with her vision of excellence and wealth of experience in program building, is well-poised to drive development of future collaborations between ADSC and A*STAR. We look forward to working together with the Illinois faculty and students at ADSC to develop cutting-edge science, and generate activities that add to the vibrancy and diversity of local digital sciences and media technologies."

"With her strong background in data security and scientific databases, Marianne is uniquely equipped to lead the Center into its next phase," said Ilesanmi Adesida, Dean of the College of Engineering at Illinois and Willett Professor. "She has a strong technical expertise, is a visionary, and drives innovation."

Winslett holds a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University. She joined Illinois in 1987, subsequently receiving a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation and being named an ACM Fellow. In addition, she currently serves on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Information and System Security and the Very Large Data Bases Journal.

Her research interests focus on information security and the management of scientific data. Most recently, she was the co-leader of the TrustBuilder project that resulted in the development of new approaches to access control and authentication for use in open computing environments. In her new role as Director, she will provide leadership on the Human Sixth Sense Program, ADSC's signature project that seeks to seamlessly integrate human and machine interactions.

Health Monitoring: Researchers are working to design a scalable, trustworthy cyber-physical infrastructure for continuous health monitoring. They aim to build sensors that can unobtrusively monitor body temperature, blood pressure, and other vitals, while at the same time capture readings and sense activity from external monitors and other objects.

In addition, Winslett will oversee ADSC's educational focus. Several workshops have already been planned for 2010, including the first of a series of courses on multimodal information access and synthesis, co-organized with A*STAR's Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R). In the summer of 2010, Illinois experts will travel to Fusionopolis to conduct a multicore programming course and discuss breakthroughs in parallel computing research, in an event co-organized by A*STAR's Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC). More details are available at https://adsc.illinois.edu/calendar.html.

ADSC draws on the collective strength of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, with expert faculty in medical devices, embedded and real-time systems, hardware/software codesign, networking and distributed systems, information trust and security, cloud computing, and computer vision.

"I'm very excited about this opportunity for us to carry out an exciting new research program while building bridges to researchers and industry in Asia," Winslett says.